


where to now?

by iaintinapatientphase



Category: Natasha Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812 - Malloy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-11
Updated: 2017-08-11
Packaged: 2018-12-13 22:38:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11769852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaintinapatientphase/pseuds/iaintinapatientphase
Summary: "Natasha does her best to shake off the cobwebs of her heartache, and goes where she’s driven, does what she’s told. The wheels of her life keep moving, and she does her best to keep up."Natasha, after.





	where to now?

August slams into Natasha like a runaway train, one she should have seen coming. It seems impossible that the world should continue after she so thoroughly destroyed her own, but she gets her orientation packet in the mail anyway, and Aunt Marya and Sonya keep saying things like “packing” and “fall clothes” and “textbooks.” Natasha does her best to shake off the cobwebs of her heartache, and goes where she’s driven, does what she’s told. The wheels of her life keep moving, and she does her best to keep up.

“Hey.”

Natasha looks up from her breakfast -- five more bites of toast left, three more strawberries; she finds that counting things makes it easier these days.

“Did you see your roommate assignment?”

She shakes her head wordlessly.

“You should have an email,” Sonya prompts gently. More gently than Natasha deserves. “I just got mine.”

Her phone is next to her plate, and she could check right now, but it’s all she can do to finish eating. “I’ll look in a minute,” she says. “My laptop is upstairs.”

Sonya looks at her a bit strangely, but lets it go. They finish their meal in silence, and Natasha washes both their dishes -- a small penance -- before escaping upstairs, locking her door, and sitting at her desk. She counts thirty seconds before gingerly opening her laptop.

Her parents had wanted her to have a single, to focus on her studies, but Natasha had insisted on a roommate. Hoping for Sonya, of course, but that was before she knew freshmen weren’t allowed to choose.

She pulls up her inbox and just for a moment thinks, with a flash of terror and desire, that maybe they’d put her with Helene, but then she remembers that Helene lives off campus with the other Girls Like Her. Tall and pretty with sharp tongues behind their full, painted lips, rings on their fingers and something like _knowing_ in their eyes. Natasha imagines it, having Helene for a roommate. Getting to know the things that Helene _knows_ , the right dress, the right party. The way to talk to a boy without feeling so horribly exposed. Come on, she’d say, you have to come out with me tonight. And Natasha would protest, a bit, because she has to study, but no, Helene would say, a pretty girl like you shouldn’t be at home studying. You should be out having fun. Andrey would want you to have fun.

And Natasha would nod, yes, of course. He would want her to have fun. That’s one of the things he always liked about her, the way she could light up a room with a smile, the way she made that deep melancholy in him lift just a bit. The way he looked at her like she was the only thing in the world, always like that first time they went ice skating and she spun around, laughing at nothing but the sheer exhilaration of being alive. Andrey liked that about her, and of course Helene would be right. Helene would always be right, would always know the right answer, and Natasha wanted to know too. So she’d go with Helene, and fall further into the world of Girls Like Helene, daring and almost frighteningly intense, with boys’ eyes that burned and words that meant too much. Girls Like Helene and Boys Like Anatole, with all the thrilling and terrifying possibilities, all their promises kept just beyond her reach. Boys Like Anatole, charming and captivating and treacherous and --

Natasha shook her head so hard she could hear her earrings jangling together, shaking the remnants of yesterday’s dreams away. She would never be a Girl Like Helene, would never be with a Boy Like Anatole, would never be Andrey’s girlfriend ever again. That was all over for her. Everything was over for her.

She opened the email, heart still pounding, saw a name she didn’t recognize under her room assignment. A girl with a normal sounding name, Anna, who didn’t know anything about the Kuragins, or Andrey, or what Natasha did earlier that summer. Who knew nothing about Natasha at all, and nothing Natasha still wanted to know.

She snapped her laptop shut. Good, she decided, pretending she didn’t feel a stab of traitorous disappointment under her relief. She was still too embarrassed to be hanging out with Helene anyway.

\---

She feels Andrey’s absence in her life like a slow healing wound, the lack of him a constant ache. She never sees him on campus, which was odd, she thinks, considering that she chose Yale for him (if she’s being honest). He had promised that they’d study together, hang out between classes, get meals. But nowhere in New Haven does she catch a glimpse of him. At first she keeps her head down, hurrying between her dorm and class and to the gym, headphones in and a scarf to block her face. So terrified she’d run into him and have to see him looking -- Natasha can’t decide what would be worse: seeing him upset, hurt by her betrayal; or to see him laughing or talking or simply calm, like nothing had ever happened at all.

It occurs to her, one afternoon, heart still pounding after she saw a vaguely familiar head of hair, that Andrey slipped out of her life as simply as he was always offering to. He always insisted he would let her go if she wanted, and it hurt to realize how much he had apparently meant it. He used to say, sometimes, when he was in one of those moods of his, that she could leave him at any time, and it would be fine, as long as she told him the truth. Insisting that he didn’t want to be with someone that didn’t want to be with him, that she was free to break up with him at any second. You’re sure, he’d said, when she said yes to their first date. You’re really sure? And again, scrutinizing her for doubt at every step at their relationship. I don’t want to be with someone that doesn’t want to be with me, he’d say, a sort of distance in his eyes. Holding himself just beyond her reach until he was sure her promises were strong enough to hold him.

Natasha thought he was testing her. A riddle, a game, a way to prove her love and capture her prince. The enchantment to break before the happy ending. I love you, Andrey, she’d say, once, twice, three times. It’s you and I, Andrey, forever, again and again and again, there’s no one else.

And now there was no one, else or otherwise. She studies alone at her desk with no companion but her music, schedules her classes to have as little downtime as possible, eats protein bars while she walks or in a corner of the dining hall with a book and headphones. She feels her alone-ness, every slow passing, heavy moment of it, part of her still mourning for the life she had dreamed about with Andrey. Her future looming large and incomprehensible in front of her, like a night sky; once thrilling and infinite, now terrifying in its emptiness. Where would she go now? What would she do?

Her phone buzzes. 12:55 PM, it says. She has to go to her next class.

\---

“Oh!” her classmates exclaim, when ages come up. “You’re so young.”

Natasha doesn’t feel very young, these days. Logically, she knows she is. Immigrant parents mean working harder than everyone else, skipping a grade, ending up in college at seventeen with enough AP credits to make her a junior. So, yes, to the twenty one year olds in her advanced French classes, Natasha is indeed young. A baby, the nice girls with glasses and triple majors coo; a prodigy, the ones with coffee cups and bitten-down nails say, sizing her up. She offers a half smile and an explanation: she’s not that young, really, she just has a late birthday. But she works a little harder, now. Makes absolutely certain that her answers are correct before she raises her hand, talks slowly to remove fillers from her speech. She may be young, yes, but she’s not a little girl, she’s not stupid, she’s not going to lose her head again. No one will look at Natasha and think she’s naive ever again. She buys reading glasses she doesn’t need, wears nothing but black sweaters and long skirts, sits in the front row of all her classes and ignores the stray glances from boys.

They come anyway, the glances, the looks, the shifts in posture when she walks by, the invitation in the way they watch her. Natasha tries her best to ignore it, but she still feels the fluttering in her stomach, the thrill up her spine -- the feeling of being wanted, the way the want-er makes it known.

She had chased that feeling before she flinched from it, this summer. In the garden with Sonya, arms linked, whispering about the boys they could tell were watching. It was a game, then, play-acting at the dance of want and wanting. Batting her eyes because she thought she should, the boys smirking back because that was what was they were supposed to do.

But then. Anatole. Anatole and the way that everything became very real, very fast.

She could feel his eyes on her, traveling along the lines of her shoulders and her arms, down the low neck of the dress that had seemed so daring just hours before. She and Sonya had giggled about it, had imagined Aunt Marya’s scandalized gasp when she saw what they were wearing, had already heard her warnings about attracting undue and unwanted attention.

Anatole’s attention was undue, probably. Not entirely unwanted. But it was, it was -- it was different than Natasha expected. Heavier. Laden with unsaid expectations and asking questions that she didn’t know how to answer.

Natasha knows better than to play with fire that way now. She avoids it altogether, goes days without speaking to anyone but her roommate and her professors and Sonya, sometimes. It feels safer flying under the radar, unnoticed and unworthy of attention. She sticks to the script, plays her part: nice girl, smart girl, good girl. A girl who’s too nice to cheat on her boyfriend, too smart to be taken advantage of, too good to try to run off to Europe with an older boy in the middle of the night. A girl who would never be as naive and stupid as Natasha had been, and who never would be again.

\---

Natasha awakes one November morning and stumbles through the motions of getting dressed and caffeinated and out the door in time for her Tuesday/Thursday 8:00 AM. She’s got it down to a science, checks her email while she brushes her teeth, texts her mother a few waving emojis on her way downstairs.

She walks out the door into a world of shining white, and gasps cold air.

Snow. She almost forgot.

It’s still early enough that the sidewalks have yet to be shoveled, the vast expanse unmarked by footsteps and spilled coffee and the passage of time. Natasha stands in the doorway for a moment, captivated by the expanse of it, the total transformation of the world into something shining pure and uncorrupted.

She hesitates, for a moment, unsure if she can step forward, if she dares disturb the perfect serenity of the world. It’s silly, she tells herself, breath huffing out in a cloud that fogs up her unnecessary glasses. It’s just snow. A thousand other students will be walking those same paths in less than an hour, and the point will be moot. It doesn’t matter if she’s the first to do it or not.

And yet.

And yet she takes a step anyway, and then another, and then another, and then she stops counting and listens instead to the crunch of her footsteps, her headphones forgotten in her gloved hand. A chilly wind whips her scarf across her face. She twists to push it out of her eyes, and catches a glimpse of her footsteps behind her, a long line of proof screaming that she was here, that she made a mark, and thinks briefly that it looks a bit like a cover of a book she once read, a story she was always longing to step into.

Natasha keeps moving forward.

\---

Finals are there before she knows it, despite counting each day down on her calendar. She and Anna sit on their beds, only two feet apart in their cramped room, and quiz each other; verbs and dates and names. They order pizza when they realize the dining hall is long past closed, share hysterical bouts of laughter when the clock passes 3:00 AM. When it’s all over, and they still have a few hours between packing and going home for Christmas, they lay on the floor, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars Natasha covered their ceiling with when she moved in. It felt odd, doing it, like it was something the girl she used to be would have done, but she finds the made up constellations a comfort anyway.

“You’ve never told me what you actually want to do after graduation,” Anna says, too exhausted for it to be an accusation.

“I don’t really know, I guess.”

“You expect me to believe someone that spends as much time studying as you doesn’t have a plan?”

Natasha shrugs, suddenly embarrassed. “Well. There are a lot of options with International Relations.”

“So you want to work abroad? State Department or something?”

 _I wanted to run away_ , Natasha thinks to herself. Away from everything that happened and who she used to be. To places where no one knew who she was, and she could live without the weight of all the disappointments she’d been and all the expectations she still had to meet.

“Hey.” Anna nudged her on the shoulder. “It’s okay if you don’t know exactly, I wasn’t trying to be rude. Just because I chose pre-med, the world’s most predictable path, doesn’t mean I’m like, superior.”

“I know,” Natasha says, nudging her back.

“Good. You have time to figure that out.”

A beat passes.

“I do want to work abroad,” Natasha says slowly, finding the words as she goes. “I’d like to travel.”

She can hear Anna nod her agreement. “That’s cool.”

“It is,” she agrees, surprised by how much she means it. “I like the idea of it. Traveling. Different places, different possibilities.”

“Anywhere in particular?”

Natasha thinks for a moment, about the whole world laid out in front of her, no known destination, no next step. “I don’t know where,” she says. “I could go anywhere.” She counts the plastic stars above her, imagines hopping between them, between worlds, between selves, between possibilities stretching endless into the future. “Anywhere,” she says again, and smiles.

**Author's Note:**

> this is rough and not super edited but i felt like finishing it so i did. enjoy, i suppose.
> 
> [tumblr](http://iaintinapatientphase.tumblr.com/)


End file.
